GreenMAR: Green Growth Based on Marine Resources

GreenMAR (Green Growth Based on Marine Resources: Ecological and Socio-Economic Constraints; NordForsk, 2014–2018) studied how fishing, climate change and growing ocean use interact, and where they set limits to “blue growth”. Coordinated from CEES at the University of Oslo, the network brought together Nordic, US, Russian and Dutch researchers. The project funded the PhD of Anna-Marie Winter, jointly supervised in Oslo and Wageningen, on managing social-ecological systems in a changing climate. Her work examined whether Atlantic cod stocks show Allee effects, a drop in productivity at low abundance that makes recovery harder once a stock is depleted, and what this means for fisheries management as the ocean warms. The network also showed that blue growth involves multiple ocean sectors that compete for the same space and resources, and that global market connections and cross-scale interactions make the future of Arctic fisheries highly uncertain. GreenMAR’s Nordic–Russian collaboration culminated in the Moscow Summer Academy 2015 on economic growth and the governance of natural resources, which brought together 57 young scientists from 24 countries.